Understanding and exploiting the abilities of the human
visual system is an important part of the design of usable
user interfaces and information visualizations. Good design
enables quick, easy and veridical perception of key components
of that design. An important facet of human vision is
its ability to seemingly effortlessly perform “perceptual
organization”; it transforms individual feature estimates
into perception of coherent regions, structures, and objects.
We perceive regions grouped by proximity and feature similarity,
grouping of curves by good continuation, and
grouping of regions of coherent texture. In this paper, we
discuss a simple model for a broad range of perceptual
grouping phenomena. It takes as input an arbitrary image,
and returns a structure describing the predicted visual organization
of the image. We demonstrate that this model
can capture aspects of traditional design rules, and predicts
visual percepts in classic perceptual grouping displays.